The government is standing fully behind former President Bharrat Jagdeo’s controversial statements on March 8 at Port Mourant which have been labelled as racist and inflammatory saying that his comments were delivered in the third person.
“In this case the statements that the former President made were undisputedly statements accredited to others,” Cabinet Secretary Dr Luncheon told a press conference on Wednesday.
At the March 8th event at Babu John to commemorate the late presidents Cheddi Jagan and Janet Jagan, Jagdeo had accused the opposition of racism and made comments which have been labelled as racist and racially inflammatory.
He had subsequently defended his comments at a press conference on March 10th saying that he was proud of raising the race issue and that by using a derogatory term for Indo-Guyanese, he was bringing light to “whisper campaigns” utilized by the opposition in the 2011 election campaign.
When asked by Stabroek News for proof of racial incitements by the opposition in 2011, Jagdeo could provide none. He said that the evidence was there and his claim that opposition leaders ventured into villages beating drums and making racial remarks could be substantiated even though he was unable to do so at the March 10th press conference.
He said “They did it in South (Ruimveldt). I hope this doesn’t happen these elections because they did the last elections. We know racism exists we know they use that language to campaign but if we use it we are exacerbating it?
“You should really go after the people who used it in a derogatory way not me who is trying to fight this… Now when I want to fight that you are saying it’s some evidence of some divisiveness …I believe that the mere fact we are talking about it here today gives hope that everybody will be vigilant on the campaign, that we don’t use that language. And you as well as me will keep your ears open also for the whisper campaign.
“From the last election to now I can bring maybe five persons who can say we have heard this in our homes or heard that, the drum beating people walking to their homes and saying and shouting this. Would that be enough for you? Or does the Stabroek News want me to sign it and have it notarized and stuff like that?”
Jagdeo’s statement on March 8th were strongly criticized by the Media Monitoring Unit (MMU) of the Guyana Elections Commission which said that they were racially divisive. The MMU’s Report for the month of March said Jagdeo “was speaking in a known PPP/C stronghold, before a predominantly East Indian audience, and, to boot, in a highly-charged political and ethnic environment… taking into consideration the historically and politically influenced divisions that persist up to now between Africans and East Indians in this country, and which are usually more pronounced during elections periods, the Unit came to the conclusion that the anecdotal illustration used by Dr. Jagdeo to make his point about racism, boomeranged disastrously, since it came over as a calculated exploitation, for political purposes, of the known fears and insecurities of one section of the population – East Indians.”
Luncheon on Wednesday was critical of the MMU’s report stressing that Jagdeo was clear when he spoke and explained that it was others who were being racist and that if it was his party they would have been ejected. He said that the statements were not “resurrected” by Jagdeo as there were complaints about them before.
Luncheon said that Cabinet was contending that there was substance to Jagdeo’s contentions and he had been attributing the statements to others.
